Thirty-three Swoons

by Martha Cooley

  He’s on his belly. His eyes close, then reopen. They’re in shadow, but I catch their gleam. Pale moonlight washes his back. He presses one cheekbone against my inner thigh, then does the same for the other, his head swaying back and forth, his breath warm, roving. I begin arching, and his mouth plays me. I clench and clench until the chord spends itself.

  Through our window wafts a scent. It swirls densely, though it smells nothing like smoke. It smells like a man and a woman mingled, a malty, piquant tang. The swirling thickens, solidifies, and assumes the shape of a man in a tuxedo. He’s tall and lean, his dark hair tousled. He wears a black eye-mask and white gloves. In one outstretched hand, he holds a small glass bottle shaped like a whale, its spout glinting in the moonlight.

  The man’s fingers squeeze the whale bottle gently. I see a scent emerging, a fine, full spray.

  Sam sits up. Are you something like a genie? he asks the man in a tone of helpless awe.

  Something like that, answers the man. He speaks with an accent—a Russian accent, I now realize. The timbre of his voice is reedy, seductive.

  Actually, he adds, I am more like a conjuror.

  Can you conjure children? asks Sam.

  The man’s eyebrows dip into a frown. Children?Nyet! Too complicated! As Mayakovsky said: “Who can control this? Can you? Try it . . .”

  I sit up. I’ve figured out who this man is: he’s my father in disguise. I begin yelling, my voice loud and hoarse.

  You’re quoting Mayakovsky? He was talking about love! Remember whatthatis, Jordan?

  Of course I do.

  No you don’t! You don’t know a thing about it!

  Please, my dear. It was time for me to exit. As you were well aware—you helped me off the stage! Let us not forget the facts.

  Paying no attention to our exchange, Sam gazes earnestly at Jordan. Try, he pleads.

  Try what? asks Jordan, perplexed.

  Try conjuring a child!

  Ah, my poor friend, says Jordan, his tone indicating he’s just figured out what Sam is talking about. For that, you will need a different partner. This one here (he points at me) is following another path! I respect this—after all, I never intended to become a parent myself. It happened entirely accidentally. This daughter of mine has made her choice: no children. Yet she’s left with a residual feeling of—oh, what’s the English word? Ah yes,gloom!How to cheer her, reassure her? How to tell her—

  Oh, fuck off, I interrupt in disgust.

  He gazes at his whale bottle, then leans over and begins murmuring to it.

  She doesn’t understand, my darling, he says consolingly. And now she’s angry, our daughter’s so angry with me! Camilla, chérie, what should I do?

  Get lost! I shriek at him.

  Lost? He smiles wanly at me. But I already am, my dear. I already am.

  There’s a swirling of opaque light. Now Jordan is wearing a white eye-mask whose contours are ringed with rhinestones—only he’s not Jordan anymore, he’s Meyerhold. The disguise has been dropped.

  The director shakes a long forefinger at me.

  You did indeed help your father off the stage, he says, his tone coolly admonitory. And it was your decision to do so.

  He wraps his cape tightly around himself. I cannot see his eyes, still concealed by the mask, but I sense the heat of their gaze.

  And don’t make the mistake, he adds, of thinking your father wasn’t grateful for your assistance. He certainly was! But he was silenced by his need for privacy. Ask yourself this: Is disclosure your natural instinct? Might you not extend a little sympathy for the old man’s failure of nerve? Yes, he should have told you about Eve . . . Yet on that score, you’re not the only person owed an explanation, after all! What about Danny?

  Another swirl of light and I awake.

  HAVING ENCOUNTERED, on the same street corner within a ten-minute stretch of time, the full complement of men in my life, I returned home both stimulated and fatigued. I ate supper, went to bed early, and fell immediately into a deep sleep.

  Awaking the next morning to an indefinably charged scent, I realized I’d had another strange dream. Sitting on the edge of my bed, still drowsy, I made myself focus as hard as I could. In the dream there’d been some sort of altercation with Jordan. Sam had also been there; something took place between the two men. And Meyerhold had been onstage as well. He seemed to be turning into a regular presence in my dreams.

  I made up my mind to borrow from Stuart a couple of biographies I’d read years ago. It was time to reacquaint myself with the Russian director’s ideas about theater. About the pleasures and perils of disorientation. And theaters as sites of dreams.

  I SHOWERED and put on my work uniform, as Stuart calls it. Every day I wear the same thing: chic black jeans, a white T-shirt (V-necks, in fine cotton or silk), a blazer (linen in summer, gabardine in spring and fall, cashmere in winter), Italian loafers or boots, and gold jewelry. I carry a small, elegant knapsack. My uniform’s expensive, but the expense is part of my cost of doing business. When you’re a dealer in inessential and costly objects, dressing scruffily is not a good idea.

  Heading out the door, I remembered that I had a lunch date with Sam. At The Fourth Wall, I phoned him and left a message suggesting a time and venue—relieved that he rarely answers his cell phone, preferring to treat it as a beeper. He needn’t call me back, I told him, unless there was a problem.

  At ten (early in my business—most collectors are night owls), a young actor came by with a collection of stage properties from various productions that had been mounted in London in recent years. He’d just broken up with his British boyfriend, he said, a professional props man (and, it seemed, a likely pilferer), from whom he’d received a small treasure trove of props that he now wished to trade for fast cash. I ended up taking the whole terrific lot, including a beautiful crop and bridle from a Broadway run of Equus. (These items, I saw, were authentic; they bore the PT stamp of the Plymouth Theater. I figured they would impress a client of mine who, being heavily into both theater and horses, considers Equus the best play ever written.) The deal was concluded affably and in my favor.

  An hour later I sold a wide-brimmed black hat to a client who’s an obsessive collector of Samuel Beckett memorabilia. The hat entered my shop on the head of a woman who looked to be around sixty. After introducing herself, she told me her story. Apparently Beckett’s Ohio Impromptu (a wonderful little stage piece with two characters, a Reader and a Listener) had premiered at Ohio State University in 1981, and this woman had been in charge of props and costumes. One of the props (there were only two) was a hat; the other was a book that lay open on a table throughout the performance. (They’d used a French dictionary, an amusingly Beckettian touch.) Would I, she asked, be interested in the hat?

  Her story had to be true, and her hat was in mint shape. I made her an offer that she happily accepted, evidently feeling no strong attachment to her headpiece. Then I called my Beckett-besotted client, who showed up within minutes, checkbook in hand, and paid me very handsomely for the hat.

  I phoned Stuart to brag about my morning’s take. After congratulating me, he told me I’d missed a golden opportunity: I should’ve asked the seller if she still had the dictionary as well. Or perhaps she’d kept one of the long black coats worn by the play’s speakers? I got off the phone and kicked myself for not doing exactly as he’d suggested.

  THE IMAGE of a black coat, however, prompted me to recall a few more details from the previous night’s dream. In it Jordan had been whispering something to a small perfume bottle. Whale shaped, it had actually spouted its scent—a nifty bit of bottle engineering.

  The whale bottle in turn reminded me of a conversation with my father that had taken place when I was in sixth grade. It concerned a report on sea creatures that I was writing for science class. I’d asked Jordan what made dolphins and whales so special.

  I don’t know about dolphins, he’d answered, but ambergris is one thing that makes whales special. Spe
rm whales secrete it. A very heady scent. Makes some people a little dizzy.

  Like ammonia? I asked.

  No, in a nice way. (He didn’t add—I would have been too young to understand—that ambergris is said to smell strongly like a woman’s secretions.)

  How do you get it out of the whale? I asked.

  You have to kill the whale, he said. Which is why ambergris is rare and expensive. Most ambergris these days is artificially produced—except in Russia, where they get it straight from the source.

  I expressed outrage at the idea of Russians hunting and killing sperm whales, and Jordan shrugged.

  Whales aren’t the only animals in Russia that produce scents, he said. There are Russian beavers, whose glands produce castoreum. It has an earthy, leathery smell. Makes an excellent fixative. But getting the oil from the beaver is tricky, because its sweat glands are located right between the anus and the genitals in both the male and the female.

  This embarrassed me, but Jordan seemed not to notice.

  Canada, he continued, produces a better castoreum. But there’s one thing from Russia that nobody can beat: birch tar oil, from the birch trees that grow over there. It’s used to make the cuir de Russe fragrance, Russian leather. The Russians also do a nice harvest of roses. And clary sage, and certain umbellifers. Those are weeds—at least that’s what we call them. In Russia not everything we consider a weed is a weed. Over there they have different ideas about things.

  I’d gathered as much from my social studies class, but I said nothing.

  Russians, Jordan continued, have been involved in fragrance for a long while. Actually it was the Venetians who first brought the Russians into the European perfume market. Venice had a trade triangle going between southern Russia, Egypt, and Venice. The Venetian merchants used to nab teenaged boys from the Black Sea area and sell them off in Egypt, to serve in the army. The Venetians probably swapped perfume for those boys in Odessa or some other Crimean port. Clever people, the Venetians! Excellent traders.

  For the first time, I’d realized how well informed about perfume my father was. He’d acquired most of his knowledge while working for Coty, which had its own Russian connection: Ernst Beaux, the St. Petersburg-born creator of Chanel No. 5. Beaux was a technical innovator whose formulas made use of newly created aldehydes—molecules that smelled something like a hot iron on damp cotton. They could spur raw materials to greater depth and loveliness, and they gave the entire perfume industry a boost. (Beaux was rumored to have developed Chanel’s famous scent while working for Coty. A few years after No. 5 appeared on the market, Coty began selling a fragrance called L’Aimant that bore a powerful resemblance to Chanel’s perfume, although nobody was ever able to prove that the Russian had tricked anyone.)

  Jordan knew all about Beaux’s aldehydes, but they weren’t his passion. What riveted him was the paradox of a perfume’s birth. That birth always begins with a death—“the agony of the flower,” as his French colleague Roudnitska called it, which occurs during its harvesting. After a flower is cut, its scent goes through moment-by-moment transformations that make it highly unstable and unpredictable. For the perfumist, the challenge lies in capturing the right smells from this rapidly shifting spectrum before they evanesce altogether.

  This obviously requires considerable technical skill. A good perfumist, however, begins not by manipulating molecules but by recollecting unusual and powerful experiences. Distinctive perfumes require distinctive origins, said Roudnitska. Feelings first, science second.

  My father satisfied Roudnitska’s requirements. He could recollect in its entirety an experience utterly foreign to his peers: that of watching a wife expire in a room filled with the smells of parturition. The flower’s agony.

  THOUGHTS OF Jordan and the dream had led inexorably to my mother. This time, though, instead of feeling what I normally felt when confronting her in my mind—guilty, glum, and alienated all at once, like a child scolded for not crying at the funeral of a relative she didn’t actually know—I felt anger, a sudden gust of it gyrating across me.

  I pulled aside the curtain concealing my dartboard, opened my drawer of photos, and contemplated my options. Choosing a pair of head shots, I fixed them to the board and began tossing my darts. I took aim first at my mother (whose picture I’d photocopied for this purpose) and then at Eve—Camilla, Eve, Camilla, Eve—hitting them over and over, hard, until I’d covered both their faces with tiny pricks. Then I removed the targets and sat at my desk.

  What, I wondered, would Stuart think if he were to walk in and discover me engaging in this secret pastime? This is how you’ve chosen to pay for being an understudy, he’d say. You see yourself as second fiddle, and you’re paying with resentment! That’s one thing you’ve got oodles of, isn’t it?

  ALMOST NOON: time to meet Sam. My dart tossing had let off some steam, and my mind felt nicely vacant.

  As I made my way east, yet another detail from my latest dream came to me. Jordan had been wearing a tux, just as he had in the juggling episode. Although I’d never actually seen my father in formal attire, I knew he’d been no stranger to it.

  I recalled the sight, in my dream, of his white-gloved hand around a whale-shaped bottle of perfume. And his odd accent—but wait, no, that hadn’t been Jordan—it was Meyerhold. He’d impersonated my father, pretending to be Jordan before revealing that he wasn’t.

  The tumblers were falling into place now. Sam, perturbed, had asked Meyerhold to conjure a child. For that, the director had replied, you will need a different partner. And hadn’t Meyerhold said something about an explanation owed to me, and to Danny as well? About Eve?

  “Cammie?”

  Sam’s voice startled me. I’d arrived at our appointed spot on Grove Street, unaware that I’d actually stopped walking.

  “You look zoned.” Sam gave me a hesitant smile.

  “I am, a little,” I said.

  “Well, do you want to go in, or would you rather collect yourself first?”

  I stared at his face, which remained more familiar to me than anyone else’s; I knew its every mark and line. “I’m getting collected,” I answered after a moment. “Though I’m not particularly hungry.”

  “That makes two of us,” he said. “Don’t know why I have no appetite—maybe it’s the balmy weather?”

  I scanned Grove Street, seeing as if for the first time the recently budded pale-green leaves, their tracework shadows spilling over the sidewalks.

  “Let’s—”

  “—walk,” Sam finished with me, our voices landing on the word at the same time.

  We began strolling westward in easy adjacency, our knapsacks slung over our outer shoulders so they wouldn’t collide. As we walked we chatted. I heard about Lila’s volunteer work at Abby’s school, about the Williamsburg gallery’s increased insurance premiums, about Sam’s newest photo-book projects. His favorite, he said, was a Wegman-style collection of pet portraits featuring not dogs but birds—in particular an irascible mynah bird named Cockpit, whose owner (a former pilot) had captured the bird’s antics in a stunning series.

  From me Sam heard about The Fourth Wall’s latest acquisitions and sales. He was also told about several plays I’d seen during the spring, about Stuart’s computer problems, and about the garden store that had replaced Eve’s. He did not hear anything about Nick. Sam and I never discussed the Paramour in any but the most cursory terms. Ditto for Lila. No sand in the crankcase, Stuart had once said, and Sam and I obeyed that rule.

  TALKING, WE wound our way up, down, and across streets we’d walked countless times: Hudson, Commerce, Barrow, Jones, Morton, Leroy, Carmine. We covered the length of Bedford Street (past The Fourth Wall, at which we both cast a proprietary glance), finally turning east on Christopher Street.

  In Sheridan Square we settled into a booth in a café. Neither of us alluded to the fact that we were spending not just a lunch hour but the better part of an afternoon in each other’s company. By the time we’d ordered our
second iced coffee, we’d dispatched a good many topics, though Danny wasn’t among them.

  I was the one to insert her obliquely into our conversation. After hearing about Sam’s latest car, a secondhand Audi, I mentioned that Danny and I would be driving Jordan and Eve’s old Volvo wagon to Ithaca.

  “It’s still up and running. Which is unbelievable, really, considering it’s over twenty years old,” I said.

  “So you’re making Danny do the driving.” Sam was putting his toe in the water.

  “I hate to drive unless I have to, as you know. This whole idea’s hers, remember? I’m just going along for the ride.”

  Sam gave a short smile. “Oh, I suspect it’s somewhat more complicated than that.”

  “But of course.” The smile I returned was similarly brief. “With her it tends to be, doesn’t it?”

  Sam waded in a bit further. “We talked last night. She told me about Eve’s having been artificially inseminated.” He paused. “What sort of arrangement do you think Eve might’ve made with that guy—what’s his name, Bobby?”

  “Billy. Billy Deveare, Danny’s father.”

  “Yeah, I suppose.”

  My face must’ve registered my confusion. “There’s no way of knowing for sure that he was the father,” Sam said. “All Danny’s got is a piece of paper stating Eve was inseminated. The donor’s not listed.”

  “But Billy’s on the birth certificate,” I said.

  “Which means only that he agreed to sign his name. It’s not proof.”

  “What are you saying? You mean Billy didn’t—but why would he do that?”

  “Who knows?” Sam answered. “Money, maybe. Or perhaps he just wanted to lend Eve a hand in a tough situation. Maybe he felt sorry for her and agreed to be the father, but on paper only. Maybe she had some other guy in Ithaca.”

  I shook my head. “Too complicated, Sam. There’s a much simpler scenario. Eve decided she wanted a kid, and Billy was willing to be the father in the physical sense—and legally. But they weren’t actually lovers, so she borrowed his sperm.”